Coaching practices for The One Minute Manager Three Practices That Still Work During a Big Change

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Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

  • My whole attention as a manager is tuned to what’s broken
  • My check-ins with people are rare and long, and by the time we sit down so much has piled up that the meeting feels heavy and high-stakes
  • We keep piling new initiatives on top of old ones we’ve outgrown but never stopped, so the team is overloaded and there’s no room to start anything fresh
  • When someone does something genuinely great I tend to file it away to mention at their review, and by the time it comes around it’s gone cold and vague
  • My team lives in pure execution mode, head down, one fire after another, and so do our meetings

Practices that may help

  1. The One Minute Manager: Three Practices That Still Work
    Blanchard and Johnson’s One Minute Manager distills management to three practices: one-minute goals (clear, written, short), one-minute praisings (specific, immediate, genuine), and one-minute reprimands (immediate, behavior-specific, followed by reaffirmation). The framework is a 1982 practitioner classic, not a clinical protocol, but the mechanisms — specificity in feedback, timeliness, and the separation of behavior from character — are supported by decades of subsequent research in reinforcement and feedback theory.
  2. Catch people doing things right
    Most management attention goes to problems — systematically noticing good work is both rarer and more powerful.
    The One Minute Manager: Three Practices That Still Work
  3. Use brief, frequent touch-points rather than long, rare meetings
    Frequent short feedback loops beat rare long reviews because the gap between behavior and feedback is what determines whether feedback changes anything.
    The One Minute Manager: Three Practices That Still Work
  4. Use Start-Stop-Keep reviews to drive continuous improvement
    Regularly ask what the team should start, stop, and keep doing — and act on the answers.
    The Rockefeller Habits: Scaling Up with Rhythm and Focus
  5. One-minute praisings: specific, immediate, genuine
    Praise that names the exact behavior immediately after it occurs reinforces that behavior far more effectively than delayed or generic recognition.
    The One Minute Manager: Three Practices That Still Work
  6. Create thinking space rather than filling every meeting with content
    The most valuable thing a coaching manager provides is protected time and space for reflection — which most teams never get.
    The Leader as Coach: A New Management Paradigm
  7. Habit 3: Put first things first
    Prioritize important-but-not-urgent work over the merely urgent — live in Quadrant II.
    The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Made Practical
  8. One-minute goals: write them short enough to re-read in a minute
    A goal that cannot be stated on a single page is too vague to be evaluated or acted on.
    The One Minute Manager: Three Practices That Still Work
  9. Agree in advance on what good performance looks like
    Performance conversations go badly because the standard was never made explicit — the reprimand is the first time it is stated.
    The One Minute Manager: Three Practices That Still Work
  10. Identify and anticipate upcoming transition windows
    Treat approaching life changes as scheduled opportunities for habit installation — plan before the transition, not after.
    The Habit Discontinuity Effect

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